Want to know a really interesting fact? Every regular character on The Love Boat, including little Jill, my daughter, has been divorced at least once in real life. All of ’em. I’m surprised some tabloid journalist hasn’t jumped on that fact and dubbed it “The Love Boat Curse” or something! But you know what? It wasn’t a curse. Not at all. We’re all happier now. We’ve all found new love and moved on to great things in our lives, even if we went through some major ups and downs before we got there.
Jill was the youngest of us regulars. I was the oldest. Bernie’s a little younger than me, and the older guys, the writers, the producers—so many of them are gone now. Aaron’s no longer with us. I remember how sad I was when I heard that he had throat cancer. One can only guess it had something to do with his smoking a pipe all those years. I can’t believe I smoked cigarettes for as long as I did. I might not be here if I kept smoking. (Praise be to God for Patti’s influence!)
It’s strange to think that so many of those people are gone.
I was so blessed to spend all of those years with that brilliant cast. We really became an extended family to one another: I was like the father; Bernie was the uncle; and Fred, Ted, Cindy, and Jill were the younger generation.
Like any extended family, you all grow apart a little bit after the kids leave the nest. But we’ve all stayed in touch through the years, and it’s always such a joy to see one another when we get the chance. I’m so proud of all of them!
Fred Grandy was brilliant. He had an Ivy League education and had learned some hard lessons from the school of life. His mother and father died in a crash and he was raised by his older brother. Through all of that, he emerged as this bright, go-getter of a guy. He was a speechwriter in Washington and wrote some off-Broadway plays, and then he came out to Los Angeles with his wife, had two little kids, and got this big hit TV show where his character, Gopher, would get tons of laughs. A year or so before our show ended, Fred was determined to do something bigger than acting. “I have to do something with my life that’s important. I want to help people from where I came from,” he told me. He wound up running for the House of Representatives from his home state of Iowa. I was proud to campaign for him up there. In fact, I gave him his first check! I went home and told Patti after he first brought up the idea, and we gave him a check to get started. He said, “I’m taking this to Washington with me. This makes me a viable candidate!” He was so excited.
He called me after the election and told me he won by a small percent. I was thrilled for him. Plus, I had never been close to a congressman. I remember he told me, “Now you know somebody in a medium-high place.”
The next time he ran for office, I heard he won by more than a 60 percent margin, and he served four consecutive terms. By the time we got together for a Love Boat reunion on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997, he had become the president and CEO of Goodwill Industries. He has a radio program out of Washington, DC, too, and I have a feeling he’ll always serve as a bright voice in the conservative landscape. What a fascinating guy.
Ted Lange was very, very, very popular on our show, playing that lovable bartender Isaac. Ted was such a wonderful actor and seemed to absorb everything when he came on that show. He and Fred used to call Bernie and me the “old farts,” but they both liked hearing our stories of life in Hollywood and all the great actors and directors we had worked with through the years. I enjoyed hearing their stories too. Ted made his Broadway debut in the breakthrough musical Hair, in 1968. He had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He had quite a pedigree!
The role of Isaac was so distinct, Ted easily could have been typecast for the rest of his life, just the way Ted Knight almost was with Ted Baxter. But he wasn’t. He fought hard to keep his serious side going after The Love Boat ended, and he has since become a prolific writer and director.
You know who always had faith in him? His mother. Right after we started the series, this woman came backstage to see me in Annie Get Your Gun up in San Francisco, and she introduced herself: “Gavin? I’m Ted’s mother.”
“Oh!” I said. “You must be so proud of him, getting a job like this.”
And she said, “I’ve always been proud of him.”
That was so cool. I’ll never forget how nice it was for me to go back and tell him how proud his mother was. I’m sure he already knew, but it’s always nice to hear that someone’s proud of you, isn’t it?
He directed a whole bunch of Love Boat episodes in our later years, plus episodes of The Fall Guy, and later Moesha and Dharma & Greg. He was busy directing multiple episodes of two big shows in 2012–2013, The First Family and Mr. Box Office. He also directed a stunning Othello for the big screen back in 1989 and puts on new, original plays all the time. I saw an original of his called George Washington’s Boy back in 2000, and it was brilliant. It was about the relationship George Washington had with one of his slaves and raised the question of whether our first president was actually the father of this young man.
Ted’s first wife was a dancer. They married in 1978, and he has two grown boys now, and he’s married to a lovely woman named Mary. I’m so proud of him too!
I never got as close to Cindy Tewes as I would have liked during our years together on that show. She has faced some terrible ups and downs in her lifetime. We talked about her background when we first got to know each other. She had gone to Catholic school, but she got involved in all kinds of rebellious stuff during high school. I could hardly believe the stories she told me. I felt like such an innocent by comparison!
She met a guy on a commercial shoot that first year, and Aaron Spelling paid for her whole wedding at the Hotel Bel Air. (As I mentioned, it was at that wedding when Aaron first asked Patti to come play a role on the show.)
The wedding was gorgeous. She was gorgeous! But there were problems already starting behind closed doors, stuff that nobody knew about. She got involved with substance abuse—something she would later admit, which I admired her for doing. She and her first husband divorced after only three or four years. She met an Italian drummer, Paolo, a great guy, on one of our cruises, and the two of them would eventually marry.
She left the show in 1984, and there were two different actresses who would try to fill her shoes. Neither of them caught on with the audience like she did. Cindy was Julie. She was that “today” girl. And it was so sad to see her spiral down. The tabloids were relentless. They followed her all over the place and made her life far worse than it had to be.
Eventually, she escaped from Los Angeles and the whole Hollywood scene. She divorced the drummer and found true love with a man whom Patti and I would get to know when we all reconnected nearly two decades later.
I’ll talk more about Cindy a little later on, because the two of us would grow much closer in the end. It’s funny how people can come into your life, and then leave, and then come back. We were in each other’s lives for a reason, I think—but that reason wouldn’t become clear until each of us had gone through some major life changes.
And that leaves Bernie—my fellow “old fart.” Bernie’s only a year younger than me, but playing that role of Doc made him into a sex symbol. Can you believe it? It was the first time in his life he got all kinds of attention from the ladies! Boy, did we laugh about that. You just never know in life. One minute you’re a character actor wanted more for your savvy use of dialects than you are for your looks, and the next you’re a stud in the eyes of millions of women all over the world! Women sure do love a man in a uniform. It’s true.
Bernie was married to Yolanda, a beautiful girl, when we started, and they stayed married all the way through the end of the series. Then they divorced. I couldn’t understand it. I always thought they were great together.
Anyway, he went down to Florida, did a play at Burt Reynolds’s theater, and met this talented woman from upstate New York who was the producer/stage manager. They fell in love. He told me all about her. Next time I saw him, I finally met this fabulous woman nam
ed Catrina, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. He was happier than ever. And before you knew it, they were having a baby! They had a second boy after that too. Can I remind you again that Bernie’s only a year younger than I am? I can’t even imagine having little kids at that age. It floored me! It floored him too.
He told me a funny story once. After their first boy was born, Bernie was headed out of his local CVS drugstore with a box of diapers, and the woman checking him out recognized him and said, “Oh, Mr. Koppel, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” he said.
“The diapers.”
“They’re not for me!” he said. “They’re for my baby boy!”
The fact that he’s surrounded by the love of his children and enjoying a happy marriage makes me happy. He and I had more scenes together on that show than either of us had with anyone else. That’s a lot of time you spend with someone over the course of nine years, and I couldn’t have spent it with a better guy.
The fact is, during those years, I spent far more time with my Love Boat family than I did with my real one. I guess that’s inevitable. It’s the nature of being the top guy at work, whether you’re the Captain of The Love Boat or a top manager at some corporation. I would leave my house when it was dark, and come home long after it was dark again. Twelve-hour, even fourteen-hour days were the norm. Most hourlong dramas take ten days to shoot a single episode. That’s the schedule Ed was doing over at Lou Grant, for instance. Not us, though. We were doing an hourlong show every seven days! With forty-eight extras! We went into what they call “golden hours” on Saturday many times in order to get the show finished. Imagine only having seven days for a big show like that—with all those extras, the boarding scenes, the big scenes in the carousel lounge. It was a massive undertaking, week after week. An hour of TV is like half a film each week.
Luckily, we had good background players. We had great stand-ins too. They’re the folks who fill in for us actors while the crew sets up the lights and gets the shots arranged, so we can run lines and do other things and no one is wasting time just standing around. I had the same guy for years, Lee, a Jewish man who used to work in vaudeville. (I envied him for that!) He gave me a beautiful Jewish Bible with jewels on it as a gift one time, which I cherished. He was very efficient on the set, and he worked so hard. He would watch me, this professional stand-in, and learn my mannerisms and my stance, so everything would be perfect when I came out there to do my part.
All of those guys and gals were part of my Love Boat family. This show, just like the MTM Show, was life-altering for everyone involved. We worked together for nine straight years. That’s a long time! Two years longer than MTM lasted. So once again, there would be romances, heartbreaks, marriages, divorces, even deaths. The show marked each of us in different ways.
No matter where we went for the rest of our lives, we would always be a part of that big, crazy Love Boat family. In so many ways, this was the big one. For all of us. And we’d all have to learn what to do with that massive gift of a hit that Aaron Spelling gave to each and every one of us.
18
SEEING STARS
WITH THE LOVE BOAT LAUNCH A BONA FIDE success, and the Captain’s smile seared into the American mind-set, the doors of opportunity swung open for me like never before. When you’re popular, suddenly everyone wants to be your friend—and everyone wants to have you at their party. In my case, because I was well known for my work in live theater, I wound up fielding invites to perform on all kinds of shows, to make guest appearances all over, and to lend my talents to some of the charitable efforts that some really big stars and politicians were involved in. I was so excited to meet so many of these amazing people, I said yes to just about everything! Wouldn’t you?
Of course one of the biggest stars and politicians all rolled into one was Ronald Reagan, and my encounters with Reagan began all the way back in 1960. I remember I got a call. Universal was producing GE Theater at the time, and Reagan—who was the president of the Screen Actors Guild during that period—was also the show’s producer. It turns out they wanted me to do this show as the heavy, opposite the gorgeous Peggy Lee. I jumped at the chance!
I was nervous to meet Ronald Reagan, though. The president of SAG holds a lot of sway in Hollywood. I wanted him to like me. I wasn’t sure what to say to him. Well, wouldn’t you know it, on the first rehearsal day Reagan said to me, “You want to have lunch?” He brought me down to the Universal Commissary and I never knew I had so many friends! Here I was, sitting with this great actor and the president of SAG, and everybody kept coming over wanting to say hi because they wanted to meet him.
He was taller than I had imagined, and I have to say, he and Robert Redford were the best raconteurs I had ever run into. He made me feel so good and wonderful and important—on that very first day of rehearsals. Can you imagine? We talked about everything. He told me he loved radio, and he loved announcing sports. He loved sports. He used to be a lifeguard! I asked about his mom and dad, and he told me that his mom had died of Alzheimer’s. I had never heard of that before. He was telling me all of this very personal stuff.
Anyway, we did the show, and it was a big hit. And then Peggy Lee invited me back to her place at the end of the shoot. I didn’t go! My goodness, it was nice to be asked. But I was married with a new baby on the way. What kind of a guy did she think I was?
Flash forward some seventeen years or so, and I’m the Captain of The Love Boat. I’m out one evening eating chili at Chasen’s, one of our favorite restaurants, and Maude Chasen asked me to host an awards show. I had never emceed before. But the producers of the event were glad to run into me, and sure that I was capable of pulling it off. The big honoree that night was going to be Nancy Kissinger, and her award was going to be presented by none other than Nancy Reagan.
As luck and fate would have it, the organizers sat me at the Reagans’ table for the dinner. Patti got all dolled up, and a jeweler let her borrow a magnificent set of diamonds just for the evening. We got there early and we sat there waiting, all excited to think we were about to sit next to the former governor of California and his wife. I forget the exact date of this event, but there was already buzz that he was going to run for president of the United States. You can imagine how excited we were to see them both and get to sit with them. We were nervous! Yet as soon as Ronald Reagan arrived, he turned all of that nervousness we had right on its head. He charmed the spit out of both of us: “Well,” he said, “I’ve always wanted to dine at the Captain’s Table, and tonight’s the night!”
I could hardly believe it: he was still that same raconteur, and he remembered who I was! Wow! “It was so great to act with you in that show all those many, many years ago,” I said, and we reminisced a bit about the days of live dramatic television. Nancy and I were seated next to each other, and we talked about our kids all night. A few years later I traveled all over the country as a representative of her “Hugs Not Drugs” program. I was so proud to do that work, because I knew how much she believed in it, and I knew how much she loved kids.
On that night, I opened up the festivities with a song and then I introduced Mrs. Reagan. I said, “I’m going to introduce this fabulous person, who I was a big fan of when she was acting at MGM. But she doesn’t do that anymore.” I said a few other nice things, talking about her bio and what kind of a person she was, and then I added something that wasn’t in the script. I said, “She’s a lady who many of us hope will be this country’s next First Lady . . . Nancy Reagan.”
The applause was immeasurable.
At the end of the night, two guys came over to me: “Mrs. Reagan wants to see you.”
“Did I do something?”
“No, no,” they said, “but she won’t leave until you come over to see her.”
I walked over to Nancy Reagan, and she put her arms around my neck and said, “You made me feel so wonderful when you said ‘First Lady.’ I’ll never forget that.”
I’m not sure if anyo
ne had said those words to her in public before. It didn’t even occur to me when those words left my lips, but I think it was a first! I was humbled and so glad that she didn’t mind. “That’s what we believe,” I said. “We believe in your husband, and we believe in you. You’re a team.”
The next time I saw them, he was president.
It was Christmastime at the White House, the big event where they have a tree for each state and they put on a show. Today Show weatherman Willard Scott emceed the event, and I sang something with Jill Whelan, the little girl who played my daughter Vicki on the show. Afterward we were in the Red Room. (You understand how surreal and spectacular this is, right? To be standing in the Red Room. At the White House. As a guest?) And all of a sudden the Bushes, the vice president and his wife, came down. “We just wanted to say hello,” they said. They were fans of the show! “The president will be down soon and he wants you to be first in the line,” they told us.
How does this happen? It just blows my mind.
So Patti and I got in place at the head of the line, and before we knew it, President and Mrs. Reagan walked in and came right over to us with a big, “Hello! It’s so nice to see you again.” We were being kind of stiff and formal, as I thought you were expected to be at this sort of event with the president, but Nancy said, “Give me a hug!” And we hugged. We got a picture together, and they signed it for us later on. By this time I was right in the thick of making appearances for the “Hugs Not Drugs” program, and I told Nancy I was out there doing whatever I could for her. She said, “I know!”
The First Lady of the United States of America not only knew who I was, and remembered who I was, but she was aware of the work I was out there doing on her behalf. It’s difficult to explain what that feels like, because I still can’t fully comprehend it myself.
This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life Page 17
